Wednesday, October 19, 2016

On false prophets

It wasn't long ago when a series of Canadian federal elections saw Stephen Harper and his Conservatives take more and more power - culminating in over four years of a false majority government - even as upwards of 60% of voters opposed virtually everything it stood for.

Some of us then figured it was worth doing something to fix the first-past-the-post system which Harper was able to exploit - especially when every national opposition party included electoral reform among its top priorities as part of the effort to oust Harper.

But Justin Trudeau has apparently given up the pretense of caring about implementing a system which represents Canadians. Instead, he's abandoning the promise that we'd seen our last FPTP election - because he's apparently perfectly happy trading an artificial claim to barely-checked power with Harper-style Conservatives as long as his party gets a turn.